We do not intend to quote that musty flower of rhetoric which was a favourite with our grandfathers.  It was the fashion then to say that Nature—­capitalised—­took the brush from the hand of the painter, meaning some old duffer who saw varnish instead of clear colour, and painted the picture for him.  Sorolla is receptive; he does not attempt to impose upon nature an arbitrary pattern, but he sees nature with his own eyes, modified by the thousand subtle experiences in which he has steeped his brain.  He has the tact of omission very well developed.  After years of labour he has achieved a personal vision.  It is so completely his that to copy it would be to perpetrate a burlesque.  He employs ploys the divisional taches of Monet, spots, cross-hatchings, big sabre-like strokes a la John Sargent, indulges in smooth sinuous silhouettes, or huge splotches, refulgent patches, explosions, vibrating surfaces; surfaces that are smooth and oily surfaces, as in his waters, that are exquisitely translucent.  You can’t pin him down to a particular formula.  His technique in other hands would be coarse, crashing, brassy, bald, and too fortissimo.  It sometimes is all these discouraging things.  It is too often deficient in the finer modulations.  But he makes one forget this by his entrain, sincerity, and sympathy with his subject.  As a composer he is less satisfactory; it is the first impression or nothing in his art.  Apart from his luscious, tropical colour, he is a sober narrator of facts.  Ay, but he is a big chap, this amiable little Valencian with a big heart and a hand that reaches out and grabs down clouds, skies, scoops up the sea, and sets running, wriggling, screaming a joyful band of naked boys and girls over the golden summer sands in a sort of ecstatic symphony of pantheism.

How does he secure such intensity of pitch in his painting of atmosphere, of sunshine?  By a convention, just as the falsification of shadows by rendering them darker than nature made the necessary contrasts in the old formula.  Brightness in clear-coloured shadows is the key-note of impressionistic open-air effects.  W.C.  Brownell—­French Art—­puts it in this way:  “Take a landscape with a cloudy sky, which means diffused light in the old sense of the term, and observe the effect upon it of a sudden burst of sunlight.  What is the effect where considerable portions of the scene are suddenly thrown into marked shadow, as well as others illuminated with intense light?  Is the absolute value of the parts in shadow lowered or raised?  Raised, of course, by reflected light.  Formerly, to get the contrast between sunlight and shadow in proper scale the painter would have painted the shadows darker than they were before the sun appeared.  Relatively they are darker, since their value, though heightened, is raised infinitely less than the parts in sunlight.  Absolutely, their value is raised considerably.  If, therefore, they are painted lighter than they were before the sun appeared they in themselves seem truer.  The part of Monet’s pictures that is in shadow is measurably true, far truer than it would have been if painted under the old theory of correspondence, and had been unnaturally darkened to express the relation of contrast between shadow and sunlight.”